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Frequently Asked Questions

Does NitroAccelerator work with protocol encryption enabled within SQL Server?

Unfortunately, NitroAccelerator does not work with SQL Server protocol encryption enabled. Encrypted data does not compress well, so NitroAccelerator will just bypass and not compress any encrypted packets it encounters. Because of this you will not see any benefit with NitroAccelerator until the protocol encryption is turned off. However, NitroAccelerator includes its own option for protocol encryption, which is done after the data is already compressed. This maintains the performance benefit while still securing your connection.

Is NitroAccelerator cluster aware?

Yes. To run NitroAccelerator on a cluster, simply install the product on each node. On failover, your clients will continue to benefit from a compressed connection.

What is the CPU overhead when using NitroAccelerator?

This will depend on the compressibility of your data, but we typically see overhead in the range of 1-3%.

Will NitroAccelerator run on a virtual server?

Yes, NitroAccelerator can be run on a virtual machine.

Will NitroAccelerator speed up my backups?

No, NitroAccelerator only compresses the TDS protocol, and so will not impact backup speed.

Setup

System Requirements

SERVERS Windows 2008 and later PC Vista and later SQL SERVERS 2000 through 2017

Configuring the SSAS Service

The configuration file for the SSAS service must be edited to disable enforced encryption.

-Locate the msmdsrv.ini file in the SSAS config folder. The default location of this folder is

Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSAS.OLAPConfig.

-In the security section, change RequiredProtectionLevel to 0. The section should look like:

How do I set up SQL Server Analysis Services for use with NitroAccelerator Turbo?

In order to use NitroAccelerator Turbo with SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), a professional license is required and native SSAS compression and encryption must be turned off. NitroAccelerator’s compression and encryption are significantly faster than what is provided natively. Below are the instructions for configuring the SSAS service and clients for use with NitroAccelerator.

If access to the database is through an application server, do the PCs accessing that application server need NitroAccelerator installed as well?

No. NitroAccelerator will only compress the data transferred between the application server and SQL Server, so it will not need to be installed on the individual PCs accessing the application server.

If I have NitroAccelerator installed on a client or server, will I still be able to connect to a client/server that does not have NitroAccelerator installed?

Yes. NitroAccelerator does not affect any connections with non-NitroAccelerator clients or servers. However, you will only get the compression benefit on connections that have NitroAccelerator installed on both ends.

Maintenance

What is HyperCache?

HyperCache is a client-side caching technology that can further improve performance in certain environments. It works by monitoring each query to determine how stable the results are. When a given query is determined to have stable results, the client will be given results from the cache instead of waiting for the server’s response. The query is still sent on to the server so the cache can be refreshed, and if the results of a query ever change, the query entry is invalidated until the result set is again shown to be stable. Only result sets of 64k or less will be cached, so HyperCache will have the biggest impact in environments with smaller repetitive queries. The Cache Size setting in the console determines the total number of queries that can be cached, so this can be adjusted as needed for your environment.

Why does the Diagnostics dialog show a warning for my clients using MARS?

Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) is a separate protocol on top of the Tabular Data Stream that is extremely chatty and tends to perform very poorly over slow networks. To maximize performance, we recommend that our customers not use MARS, but instead use a different connection for each query. NitroAccelerator will provide a much greater performance benefit on connections that do not have MARS enabled.